Riding Amtrak can be a delight. Beyond train travel’s pleasures, shifting more car trips to trains reduces congestion. Moreover, shifting trips from cars or planes can also have vital sustainability benefits. For these reasons and a simple love of trains, Amtrak is popular in the circles in which the two of us travel: environmentalists, progressives and urban planners.
Trains need maintenance, and Chicago is a national hub. Currently, Amtrak has a rail yard south of Union Station. It has proposed relocating maintenance operations to unused rail land along Canal Street on the South Side involving Chinatown, Armour Square and Bridgeport. The optics and conflicts of interest are problematic. Development company Canal Edge is overseeing the project and partially funding it. Justin Ishbia, a White Sox minority investor, owns Canal Edge. He proposes taking the White Sox out of the South Side, where they have been since 1904, and moving the team to a new stadium at the site of Amtrak’s current rail yard. Amtrak contends it needs a new site for its maintenance operations but has not published the alternatives analysis that includes a new facility at its current location, as it did in Seattle.
Some of the arguments for the relocation sound familiar: collective benefits, progress, economic development and expanded capacity. Such arguments echo what backers of highway building claimed when bulldozing less affluent, and often Black, neighborhoods to build highways in the mid-20th century.
There are, of course, limits to this comparison. Among them, Amtrak is socially and environmentally more beneficial than massive highways, and no homes or businesses will be displaced. Yet it is still a larger pattern — claims of progress and collective benefits at the expense of less affluent, less privileged folks.
In this case, it is via increasing environmental burdens in the neighborhood.
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In the absence of a full environmental review and release of an alternatives analysis, we still see greater future negative cumulative health impacts from the relocation, where more low-income residents would be affected. For instance, the census block groups closest to the proposed Canal Street yard experience some of the highest levels of dangerous particulate matter (PM 2.5), ranking at the 97th percentile, compared with the 76th percentile on the Near West Side, according to the Environmental Justice Screen archive.
The tool’s supplemental index demonstrates how disparate toxic exposures could become exacerbated with the proposed move and expansion of Amtrak. The index captures specific environmental burdens after pairing it with demographic vulnerabilities, averaging factors such as income, disability, English proficiency, educational attainment and life expectancy.
Environmental burdens are already high for residents here, but the cumulative impact of this shift may magnify differences between the two neighborhoods, with increased diesel particulate matter and other toxic releases degrading air quality that is already poor. This is an environmental justice issue playing out in real time.
Unlike the highway era, the National Environmental Policy Act now requires environmental reviews for federally funded projects. Amtrak, using studies not shared with the public, sought and received a categorical exclusion from the federal government.
Recently, cities across the United States have successfully challenged other attempted categorical exclusions to environmental review processes. In New Jersey, the federal government reported that a detention center expansion was not significant, that the existing infrastructure could accommodate the changes and that the environmental burdens were “unlikely to cause significant harm.” Roxbury Township in New Jersey and residents complained that categorical exclusions separating the facility from the existing site and the surrounding land, while not taking into account excess resource use and public health concerns, were in violation of environmental regulations.
Other legal challenges to Amtrak’s exemption are likely possible with more transparency around the studies that claim no significant impact. For instance, what would be the cumulative health impact of increasing exposures to toxic releases to the air, given the neighborhoods have lower rates of health insurance and have limited English proficiency (95th to 100th percentile) and many people have disabilities? These barriers mean that residents have less options for healthcare when sick and are at risk of chronic illnesses and higher morbidity rates in the long term.
Community members strongly oppose the relocation of the rail yard. The differences in environmental burden are not merely a portrait of data — these differences can be seen, smelled and felt at street level.
The union representing U.S. Environmental Protection Agency staff in Illinois has called for more transparency, as have the majority of Chicago’s aldermen who oppose the current version of the project. The city of Chicago can do more to pump the brakes on this federal project through a legal challenge to the federal presumption that an environmental review is unnecessary. The data above reveal that cumulative impact may require additional review.
The Canal Street rail land presents healthier opportunities for the nearby communities. The North and Northwest sides have The 606 bike and pedestrian trail, built using a former rail right of way. The 606 is being expanded, the Englewood trail is advancing, El Paseo in Pilsen is under consideration, and North Lawndale has envisioned an Altenheim trail reinvestment corridor.
A rails-to-trails project need not be the reuse of the Canal Street yard. But residents should have a say in what it will be, and The 606 demonstrates the importance of anti-gentrification measures.
South Side residents should have an opportunity to make decisions without furthering environmental burdens. The city of Chicago can be pivotal in making that happen.
Kate Lowe is an associate professor in urban planning and policy at the University of Illinois Chicago. AJ Kim is an associate professor in city planning at San Diego State University.
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